1.1.3-Pilferingapples
Brick!club Book 1: Fantine, Ch.3 Good Bishop-Difficult Diocese …Or, as the Denny has it, A Hard Office For A Good Bishop. For once the Denny is a little more poetic but it’s an action-movie poster sort of poetry so I’mmmm just gonna stick with the FMA. In Which We Learn Why There Was a Carriage Allowance The Diocese is apparently very hard to navigate, being all hills and mountains and windy bits. I’m charmed to learn there was a basket-seat for going by donkey; would it have been a closed basket, I wonder, to keep of the rain, or did people just hang out with their heads and shoulders trapped? I’m going for the IMAGE SEARCH after this, I want to see adorable Donkey Basket conveyances. Not much meditation on this one from me, because this is really The Explicit Christ Analogy chapter. The Bishop talks like Jesus! in Parable! he rides a donkey into town and acknowledges the similariity! He heals the sick and turns water into wine! He is an eloquent, accesible public speaker with a good grasp of parable! And we know how Hugo feels about his eloquent public speakers. All very Jesussy— but I’m not familiar with Christian theology enough to have any more than the most obvious OH HEY JESUSY comments, so I’ll throw this to the actual Bible-readers in the club. A Thing: The Bishop mentions one town giving the poor “the right to mow their meadows three days before anyone else”. Does this mean what I think it means— the right to gather animal fodder (hay and/or grass) THREE DAYS before the rest of the town? Would there have been a restriction beyond sheer physical capacity on how MUCH they could mow? If not, wow, that is indeed a colossal allowance. A Brick!club thing—people are posting with the tag, but apart from my blog, a LOT. So be sure to check the Brick!club tag for discussion and not just this blog. There is some very good discussion out there! Commentary Laissezferre I’ve really got nothing else to say here apart from I wish Feuilly had been born in Queyras so that he could have had an education for free… oh, and how the Queyras mayor’s qualities remind me of another mayor far into the future. Treblemirinlens I did a Google image search for “cacolet”(the term Wilbour uses, not sure if it’s in the others) and that provided several examples, not sure which is the closest but most of them look like seats strapped to the side of the mule. Found one website with information on the Civil War that had several images of types of cacolets, which were used in the war to transport wounded soldiers http://www.civilwarhome.com/woundedtransportation.htm. The Briançon story also give me the impression it meant allowing the poor to gather hay/grass as well. It reminded me of how the poor were allowed to follow behind the harvesters and gather fallen grain in the book of Ruth. Can’t think of anything else not already mentioned at this point…. I’m really enjoying reading all the input and discussion everyone has been contributing, learning so much! Pilferingapples (reply to Treblemirinlens' reply) Reblogging because I am sure the Book of Ruth will be worth mentioning at least once more before the end. AT LEAST. Also, cacolets! Gascon-en-exile The French title is “Á bon évêque dur évêché" ("For a good bishop, a hard bishopric"), so Denny’s action movie poster poetry isn’t far off the mark. I wonder if it’s significant that Hugo uses évêché rather than diocèse- they’re synonyms but the former can also refer to a bishop’s residence, and Myriel’s choice of residence from the last chapter is really indicative of his character. Anyway, to the chapter itself (if my laptop will ever cooperate with me… *grumbles*). Adding to the obvious “Myriel is Jesus” message, one can read his method of instructing via parable as a representation of Hugo’s overly symbolic writing. Whether strictly true or not is irrelevant - two chapters after we are impressed with the potential weight of even false rumors, we get the bishop giving his community both “''exemples''" and "paraboles" but with both having the same morally uplifting result. This chapter is in essence a parable about parables, with the moral that fiction is not inherently bad and can serve good ends, and also that perhaps it only has to be just realistic enough to be instructive. Les Misérables is by no means a strictly realistic text, but it still makes heavy use of that aesthetic and is still morally instructive for those who want to read it that way. Oh, and free education, redistribution of wealth, community support for the needy…more communist leanings of an early Christian bent coming from the idealized Christian of this work. I’ve read here and there on Tumblr that Ayn Rand loved Les Mis, and though I’ve never read her and therefore don’t know much about her beyond for reputation as a libertarian and staunch capitalist I can’t help but wonder how she felt about the bishop (especially since he opens the narrative and thus sets a tone for the whole book).